Multinational chemicals company BASF has furthered its interest in the energy storage industry, partnering on the development of ‘metal-free’ flow battery electrolytes with German startup JenaBatteries.

Flow batteries have so far, failed to live up to the disruptive potential they promise, a new report says, but authors Alex Eller and William Tokash at Navigant Research have identified 12 leading vendors in the nascent field, based on metrics of strategy and execution.

Vanadium producer Bushveld Minerals has offered its backing to the merger of UK energy storage provider redT with US vanadium redox flow battery maker Avalon Battery, providing a loan to help the deal get over the line – and to help its own vertical integration ambitions.

Idaho-headquartered KORE Power claims it will have 6GWh annual production capacity for its lithium battery energy storage solutions, based on high-power nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) cells, up and running during the first quarter of next year.

Portugal’s EDP has inked a deal for its largest PV project to date, a 3.8MWp solar-plus-storage duo it will develop for lead acid battery and storage system maker Exide Technologies.

With Brexit day less than a month away and still no certainty around what the final deal will look like, the time is now for the energy storage sector to prepare for every eventuality so it can play to its increasing strengths, writes Stephen Irish, co-founder of Hyperdrive Innovation.

VRB Energy, a maker of flow batteries headquartered in Canada and owned by a metal resources and mining company, said the first phase of a 40MWh flow battery project in China has now been commissioned.

SolarEdge is targeting a world where the “majority of solar systems will include storage”, according to CEO Guy Sella, as the company announced record revenues and shipments in the third quarter of 2018.

An agreement to buy 75% of Korean battery manufacturer Kokam gives SolarEdge a level of vertical integration that could make the PV company a ‘one-stop-shop’ for customers, while SolarEdge could diversify into areas outside solar energy.

First developed by NASA, flow batteries are a potential answer to storing solar – and wind – for eight to 10 hours, far beyond what is commonly achieved today with lithium-ion. In the second of a two-part special report, Andy Colthorpe dives deeper into questions of bankability, market segmentation and manufacturing strategies with four very different providers of flow energy storage technology.